Nighthawks … photographer Billy Monk worked as a bouncer in Cape Town. Photograph: Billy Monk/Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

A few weeks ago, I rounded up some of the best photobooks of 2012, but the ones I left out have been nagging at me ever since. There follows, in no particular order, a much more personal selection, most of which are still available.

Marc Asnin: Uncle Charlie, Contrasto, £35This extraordinary book landed on my desk just in time to be included. Asnin started studying photography in the 1980s and, simultaneously, began snapping his favourite (and most wayward) uncle in and around his home in Brooklyn. A riveting and at times disturbing visual diary of a troubled man with revealing conversations interspersed. Or, as Asnin puts it, "It's my dance with my godfather."

Paul Graham: The Present, Mack, £45Graham explores the idea of street photography in a book that pays a tentative homage to the tradition as it subverts it. In his adopted city of New York, Graham made a series of twinned photographs, each taken from the same place but seconds apart. The full force of the street, its randomness and strange symmetries of movement and slight repetition, are made manifest – as is the momentum of street photography. A suspicious photographer in the best sense of the word.

Lise Sarfati: She, Twin Palms, £51I interviewed Sarfati back in February for her exhibition She at Brancolini Grimmaldi in London, and found her an engaging and eccentric spirit with a fully formed, slightly leftfield vision. Now comes the book of the same name, featuring Sarfati's cinematic images of two sisters, Christine and Gina, and Christine's daughters, Sloane and Sasha. "I like doubles, like mothers and daughters, or sisters or reflections," says Sarfati. "This represents my research into women's identities ... I am interested in fixing that instability." Like all her work, the end result is both intriguing and elusive.

Will Steacy: Down These Mean Streets, B Frank Books (sold out)Steacy is a streetwise, left-leaning New York-based photographer and the editor of the excellent Photographs Not Taken, which I reviewed here. Down These Mean Streets is a merging of his own photographs with newspaper clippings, journal entries and various found material pertaining to the long death of the American dream, from Reaganomics in the 1980s to the current economic recession. A radical book that is angry rather than reasoned – and all the better for that.

Stephen Gill: Coexistence, Nobody Books, London, £30Since his 2004 debut, A Book of Field Studies, Stephen Gill has been making increasingly beautiful and ambitious photobooks. His latest is no exception. Available with six different covers, each in an edition of just 250, Coexistence is a visual exploration of a large pond in an area of wasteground in the declining industrial town of Dudelange, Luxembourg. Microscopic photographs of pond water are interwoven with portraits of townspeople in what Gill calls a series of visual "tapestries". A strangely absorbing book.

Alec Soth: Looking for Love, Komenek Books, £32Alec Soth goes back to his early days as a struggling photographer with a day job as a printer in a commercial photo lab and a social life that revolved around a bar and "the solitude I found among strangers". A series of black-and-white images evoke the atmosphere of his life then: anonymous buildings, high school dances, bar rooms, teenage dating rituals and entwined couples that flirt or gaze sullenly at his camera. Easily Soth's most melancholy and wilfully monochromatic book.

Orbetello (1974). Photograph: Luigi Ghirri

Luigi Ghirri: Kodachrome, Mack £25For the 20th anniversary of Ghirri's death, Mack have republished his first book, Kodachrome, which presents a beautifully deadpan view of Italy and, occasionally, Paris and Amsterdam. Billboards, theme parks, deserted playing fields and playgrounds and all kinds of odd details – people glimpsed through windows or reflected in mirrors; photographs of photographs. A book about colour, irony and what Ghirri called "hieroglyphs", both obvious and elliptical.

Now see this

Two contrasting views of London, past and present, are on show at the moment. The first is the actor Steven Berkoff's East End Photos at the Lucy Bell Gallery in St Leonards-on-Sea. Given his first camera aged 11, Berkoff documented the old Jewish east end of London as it changed rapidly and finally disappeared altogether. "I was fortunate enough to capture some images of that life," he writes, "before it faded away along with the people who made it so memorable." Until 13 February 2013.

In London itself, the Society Club hosts Stillsoho by Carla Borel, an evocative series of intimate black-and-white portraits of Soho characters from the last decade or so (artists, bohemians, drinkers) including some taken in celebrated hangouts such as the Colony Room and the French House. Until 31 January 2013.

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